Dinner Interrupted

Preacher Roe held the fork in front of his mouth, poised to take a bite of his Mexican dinner when I interrupted his meal to ask him about Bobby Thomson’s 1951 home run.

I was at the same restaurant in West Plains, Mo., one night in 2006 or 2007 with a friend when he nudged me and said, “There’s Preacher.”

My friend was a teacher at the high school there and Preacher’s son was on the school board. He had met Preacher before and knew my affinity of baseball and its history.

So, I got up and barged in on the former ball player’s meal. I knew I stood a chance of angering him; he was eating dinner after all. I was faced with the option of leaving him alone, or asking him about baseball stuff and either flattering him that I was interested or bothering him.

Sometimes you have to take the chance and roll the dice. The worst that would have happened was a baseball pitcher who played for the St. Louis Cardinals, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Brooklyn Dodgers from 1938 to 1954 would think poorly of me. I could live with the odds.

I introduced myself and told him I was a fan of baseball history and said it was an honor to meet him. We talked about his career briefly, all the while his chalupa was cooling on his fork, and then I steered the questions to that 1951 game.

Maybe it’s my career in news that made it easy to do that. I’ve interviewed Bill Clinton twice since he had become president;I asked vice president Dick Cheney’s wife, Ann, once if she actually wrote an article about education she claimed to have penned; and I’ve talked to convicted killers. (I once started an impromptu press conference in front of the judge’s bench with a guy convicted of four counts of capital before the judge even rendered the sentence. My bad.)

Asking Preacher about that home run wasn’t a big deal.

That was the year he won 22 games and lost only 3 and the Dodgers ended up tied with the New York Giants. On Oct. 3, 1951, after the teams split two playoff games, the Dodgers were leading, 4-2, in the bottom of the ninth when Thomson came to bat. Fans know what happened next. He hit the home run, the Giants won 5-4 and Russ Hodges went nuts with his call of “The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant...”

And a moment became immortalized while Preacher Roe sat in the bullpen and watched.

When I asked him about the game, I could tell, more than 55 years later, it still bothered him. He said he knew the ball was a home run, despite its low trajectory. “It was hit so hard and low I thought it would knock the fence over,” he said.

He also said he thought the Giants stole Dodger pitcher Ralph Branca’s signs and Thomson knew which pitch was coming. A year later, Joshua Prager wrote his book “Echoing Green,” which substantiated Preacher’s claims.

It was a great moment for me that I’ll always remember. I could have left him to his meal, but I realized it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to talk with history. I had talked with George Kell a few years earlier about baseball, and I called Ball Four author Jim Bouton once to talk about his book. You have to ignore shyness, and perhaps politeness, to take advantage of those opportunities.

Preacher Roe died in 2008. I’m glad I butted in on his dinner and interrupted.

Stat — ick

I’ve always been decent with numbers and math. My mother was a math teacher and my father did pretty well with figures as well.

When I was about 7, my mom gave me a book she used when teaching math to high school students to help develop what she hoped to become my mathematical mastery. It contained those number problems that we had to figure out. You know, if Bob left Chicago at 2 p.m. and drove 65 miles per hour and Joe left Denver at 3 p.m. and drove 55 miles per hour, at what time would they meet at the Omaha interstate Stuckeys for nut logs and beef jerky?

My deftness with words? That was another problem. I bombed my entrance tests in college and was actually placed in what the instructor of the class called “bonehead English,” a remedial course aimed more, apparently, for those who consider English a second or even third option.

And, of course, the irony here is that I make my living out of words, hammering them together into coherent sentences in the News Factory where I work.

All that to say numbers don’t intimidate me. Computers do, though.

As an avid APBA baseball game player, I’ve lately steered clear of keeping statistics for the various seasons that I’ve played. It’s blaspheme, I know. I see others who play the statistical-based game who know immediately the batting average for the San Diego Padres’ third string catcher, or the WHIP rating for  a dismal Seattle bullpen.

I’d love to be that guy, but trust is an issue with me when compiling stats on the computer.

I used to tally the numbers by hand years ago when I played the APBA basketball games. I switched over to computers later when I played the hockey game and during the first years of when I began rolling the dice for the baseball contests. Three times, after meticulously creating Excel spreadsheets that computed batting averages and ERAs, my computers crashed. 

I lost everything, including my self-esteem

Each time, after cursing whoever developed the particular computer system I was using, I soldiered on, reloading information into a newer computer. 

Invariably, it would crash again.

It became a creator of Fear. Load stats, watch computer die.

So, I quit doing that and instead just kept quickie stats by hand like players’ home runs and pitchers’ won-loss and saves records. I haven’t had to buy another computer since.

But this year, after feeing a bit guilty and seeing others post their detailed stats online, and seeing that some third baseman in their replay batted .257 with runners on second and third during day games when left-handed pitchers with a low strike-to-balls ratio were on the mound, I decided to return to the stat keeping realm.

There is limitation to my madness, however.

Instead of doing stats for everyone in the 1942 baseball season I’m replaying, I’m just tracking numbers for the Big Three of that season: Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams and Stan Musial. I load their batting performances in after each game and know now that, after 21 games, DiMaggio is only batting .275 but has 13 RBIs and Ted Williams is flirting with .400 after 19 games.

I’ll keep doing the stats for these three while replaying this season. And if the computer dies, as I expect it will, I’ll return to using pencil and calculator. 

Hey, it worked when I figured out when Bob and Joe got their nut logs and beef jerky.

Two Photos, One Innocent Time

I have autographed photographs of two baseball players hanging in the room where I roll my APBA games who were active during the 1942 season I am currently playing.

Both come with stories that remind me of human kindness that may have been more prevalent when those two ballplayers were crafting their wares on the field.

The first one is of Stan Musial. Several years ago my newspaper assigned me a story on an elderly woman who was the grandmother of a prominent Arkansan. She was 102 or 103 years old and, while residing in a nursing home, her only  infirmity seemed to be her hearing. She knew her baseball better than most people I know.

She spent the day talking about the St. Louis Cardinals and how then-manager Tony LaRussa should have changed his pitching rotation. Darryl Kile was still alive so it had to be before 2002; she thought LaRussa was not using his starters properly. Something about lefties versus righties match ups ... heady stuff for a centurion.

The Associated Press picked up my story and that weekend, Jack Buck read part of it and talked of the lady while broadcasting a Cardinals’ game on KMOX radio. 

During the interview, she told me her favorite player ever was Ozzie Smith. So, a few days later, I called the St. Louis Cardinals organization to see if I could wrangle an autographed photo of Ozzie for her. Whoever answered the phone there gave me what she thought was the number for Ozzie’s people.

It wasn’t. Instead, it was Stan Musial’s people. When I asked for an Ozzie picture, the woman at Musial’s office said, “We don’t have any Ozzie Smith’s, but would she be interested in a Stan Musial?”

I was surprised, but I had enough sense to say, “No, but I know a reporter who would.”

A few days later, the autographed Stan Musial photo arrived at my home. (I was able to get the autographed Ozzie Smith photo for the lady as well.)

A few years later, I was doing a gavel-to-gavel coverage of a murder trial in an eastern Arkansas town. During a long lunch break one day, I stopped in an antique shop perched between Interstate 55 and a cotton patch.

I found autographed photos of Joe DiMaggio and Henry Aaron. Joe was my father’s favorite player. Henry is mine. I asked the proprietor the price of each photograph. After discovering I was a reporter in town to cover that trial, he offered me a deal: He’d sell me both photographs for the price of one if I would come to his shop during breaks and tell him the proceedings of the trial.

Of course I agreed.

So, now I have the two pictures displayed in what my friend calls the “baseball room.”

I obtained both photographs through kindness and an innocence that, I like to think, was more of the norm back in 1942.

Both baseball players are dead now. Musial, revered in St. Louis as one of the nicest people in sports, sadly, died last year. But their memories live on in the photographs, as does the kinder time when both players swung their bats.

Books to Motivate Replays

I read a lot of books each year and one of the staples on my list is baseball books. Currently, I’m reading The Bird, the biography of Mark Fidrych by Doug Wilson. And on deck to be read is Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes by John Rosengren.

And as I read these books, soaking in the information and the context of the seasons these guys are playing in, I find I become interested in replaying the corresponding season with the ABPA baseball game. The books, for a lack of better wording, give me something akin to a three-dimensional look at the season.

I don’t often choreograph correctly the season I’m replaying with the APBA game to the book I’m reading. It will take me three or four days to read a book. It takes a year or more to finish playing out a full season.  Needless to say, I’ll read several baseball books chronicling different eras during a single replay.

But, at times the books motivate me to consider which replay I plan to do next.

So, I decided to compile a baseball reading list for replayers. I’ve chosen two books I’ve read for each decade. Obviously, there are numerous other books that can be added to the list. I’ve selected two each. Comments are welcome.

1910s

Eight Men Out, Eliot Asinof — The best book, in my opinion, of the allegations that 1919 Chicago White Sox threw the World Series for money.

Cobb: A Biography, Al Stump — Called the best biography of any player by critics, after I read this one, I immediately ordered the 1919 season from APBA and plan to play it next after completing the 1942 season I’m doing now.

1920s

Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, Jonathan Eig — A great look at Gehrig which follows closely the 1942 movie “The Pride of the Yankees. 

The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth, Leigh Montville — I’ve not read Robert Creamer’s book Babe, but Montville really does a good job writing of Ruth.

1930s

The Gas House Gang, John Heidenry — A look at the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals and what baseball was like then.

Joe DiMaggio: The Hero’s Life, Richard Ben Kramer — DiMaggio was more known for his play in the 1940s, but I have two other books selected for that era. DiMaggio was my dad’s favorite player; Kramer’s book is not all hero-worship and instead portrays DiMaggio  often as a standoffish person who felt he needed more accolades.

1940s

Nice Guys Finish Last, Leo Durocher — This book covers all of Durocher’s life, but the 1940s section, to me, is the most interesting. It includes his time dealing with Jackie Robinson’s first season and Durocher’s banishment from baseball for a year in that era.

Opening Day: Jackie Robinson’s First Season, Jonathan Eig — 1940s baseball history must include something about Jackie Robinson. Eig’s second book on this list.

1950s

The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson ..., Joshua Prager — This is a great one that captures the feel of the 1951 pennant race that leads up to Bobby Thomson’s classic home run as the Giants beat the Dodgers. The Giants beat the Dodgers...

The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, Jane Leavy — As Robinson was the 1940s, Mickey was the 1950s. An honorary mention on this list could be his “All My Summers.”

1960s

October 1964, David Halberstam — This reads like an APBA replay of 1964. Halberstam, who also wrote “The Summer of 49,” includes the minutiae of the season that, as replayers, we like.

Ball Four, Jim Bouton — APBA should include this book with every sale of the 1969 season. It’s a must to read this classic before beginning the season. I’ve read Ball Four a dozen times, but I’ll read it again just before I replay 1969.

1970s

Bronx Zoo, Sparky Lyle - The 1970s are the New York Yankees, and Lyle’s book shows the insanity of the team and its manager, Billy Martin.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, Jonathan Mahler — Howard Cosell is incorrectly credited for saying this during a televised Yankees game in 1977 as a fire raged near the stadium. While not all about baseball, Mahler includes the Yankees’ season to balance life in the Big Apple that year and it provides a good feel for that season.

1980s

The Bad Guys Won, Jeff Pearlman — The New York Mets won the 1986 World Series with a group of misfits. Darryl Strawberry, Dwight Gooden, Lenny Dykstra and others rag-tagged their way to the championship, with a little help from Bill Buckner. Again, this gives a great feel for the 1986 season and is a replay inspirer.

Late Innings: A Baseball Companion, Roger Angell — Begin reading this book in the spring and you’ll be chomping for the baseball season to begin. This is a collection of Angell’s baseball works for the New Yorker magazine. It includes “The Web of the Game,” which is his conversation with former pitcher Smokey Joe Wood while the two attended a Yale baseball game.

I stopped at the 1980s. There are plenty of books for the next three decades, but I’m not all that interested in replaying seasons past 1987. Yet. Maybe in another 10-15 years, the 1990s will take on a more ancient feel and be more attractive for replaying.

Again, this is a minimal list of books I’ve read that may help inspire a replay. Feel free to include your own suggestions.

How I Start a Season

Maybe it’s an obsessive-compulsive thing, but when I prepare a baseball season for replay, I get pretty detailed. It’s akin to doing my taxes and it gets to the point, during my preparation, that if anyone else was around me during this time, they’d probably commit me or at least order outpatient counseling.

It takes a while to prep a season to play.

For the uninitiated, I play APBA, a baseball game that uses player cards. Rather than pictures on their cards, numbers are featured. Game players roll dice, match the numbers to the player’s cards and then to corresponding numbers on play charts. It’s statistically based and gamers can replay any season the APBA game company produces.

I began playing the 1942 season, my first time delving in any season in the 1940s.

But before the dice is tossed, the game player has to set up the season, and that’s where it gets focused, at least for me. I don’t know how others do it; I’ve never actually spoken to another APBA player ever. I should post my phone number here sometime and urge gamers to call, but that’s for another day.

Here’s how I start: First, I set up team schedules. I go to retrosheet.org, a baseball website that lists every season and every game, and get the games played. But, because I want each team to play its full schedule, I find I have to often reschedule rainouts or forfeited games at times. For 1942, I found how many times each team played another team. Back then, teams played the seven other clubs in their league 22 times — 11 games at home and 11 on the road — for a full 154-game season. So, I meticulously find which games were not played and then squeeze them into the schedule.

I am old-school, so I handwrite everything in small block print. It goes back to second grade when my teacher held me from library privileges because I couldn’t do cursive writing well. Mastering the Q in cursive — the unexplained method of doing some curly ‘2’ for the letter — really threw me, and, as a result of banned from going to the library, I rebelled by printing ever since then. Some people throw up their arms in revolt. I print. Yes, I am a nerd.

Each team has a notebook page of its 154 games written in blue capital letters and snapped into a three-ring binder.

Then, I have team pages that list every player so I can track home runs and won-lost records.

I also set up pitching rotations, again found by using retrosheet.org, and write them down on index cards.

Finally, I write the games to be played on pages in a spiral bound steno pad and fill in lineups for several games in advance.

It takes three or four days to do all this and there are times when I almost stop and think, ‘I’m an adult here. If I put this much energy to, say, making money, I’d be in better shape.”

Then I shake the idea off and continue writing schedules, players and pitching rotations.

It’s something I’ve done with the baseball seasons since I began playing in 1998 and with APBA’s other games since 1977. It’s always worked for me, and it’s a hard habit to break. 

And, if I ever were to be committed into a mental facility for my obsessiveness, I’d at least have more time to play the games.

Bookends of Life

There’s a repetitive nature of life, a bookending of things, that, as we get older, seem more obvious. It’s either nature’s way of letting us correct errors in the past or allowing us to see things with a changed, time-adled perspective and, while we may not be able to fix them, at least we can see the differences in how we process them then and now.

When I began the 1981 baseball replay with my APBA game, I found this evident in more ways than an obvious one. 

On the surface, my goal was to replay the season with the statistically-based game to see what would have happened if the baseball strike never occurred. That season bothered me; my college girlfriend moved away at the end of 1980 and, in that stumbling reel of heartbreak that first-time loves feel, I moped through the first three months of the following year. I looked forward to the 1981 baseball season with more vigor than normal hoping the games would replace the hole in my heart.

But the strike happened and for several weeks in the summer, there were no games. The distraction I hoped for was gone.

The second goal in doing the season replay 31 years later was deeper. It was to relive, in part, those days of 1981. I could “fix” the season, but while I couldn’t repair the lost love, I could reflect on those days.

Little did I know that the season’s replay mirrored life and I came out on the other end a bit wiser of things.

The replay began and ended with pop ups. In the first game I did, Pete Rose opened my 1981 season for Philadephia with a pop up against Cincinnati. The season concluded when Hal McRae popped up against Los Angeles in Game 6 of my World Series and the Dodgers won the championship, 4 games to 2, over the Kansas City Royals.

The replay was also bookended with contact with my girlfriend from ago. Twenty-five years after our split, she called me and we’ve remained friends in the seven years since, talking on the phone and even going to dinner at times.

So, I played the game, remembering certain dates of that year and where I was. My birthday without her that year, watching Lady Diana’s wedding with her little sister at her parent’s that summer in an attempt to recapture something, the fall that I prepared to fly to Mexico to shoot photographs in a Yucatan peninsula jungle for a college class.

I talked with her on the phone, updating her on the progress of the replay. She seemed interested, but I’m not sure whether it was actual interest or simply polite attention to my weird APBA obsession.

And the bookend of life happened. When I completed the season two weeks ago, I put the APBA game cards in their envelopes and returned them to a closet where I store all the games. Then, I drove about an hour and a half to meet her for lunch. We only spent a few hours together, but it was a great time.  More than 30 years evaporated and it was 1980 again when I was young, innocent, still full of hope and in love.

We aren’t going to get back together, and that’s not the point. I think I’m damaged from the death of my wife seven years ago and I no longer trust people. I couldn’t handle a relationship if I had Dr. Phil hangin’ out with me and giving me daily tips. She also had a tough time in the past and I think dealing with a commitment isn’t in her plans now, either. 

Instead, it was more of an understanding that we were both “the ones that got away” and whatever type of relationship we maintain, it’ll be okay. 

So, the 1981 replay taught me something. The baseball strike happened because, well, because it just happened. It was what it was. It was just the way of life. Our breakup back then happened, too, because it was just the way of life as well. It was no one’s fault. It just happened.

It’s the roll of the dice, life is. You either hit home runs, or you pop up.

1981 Season Ends

Hal McRae of the Kansas City Royals popped up in Game 6 of my 1981 APBA replay World Series, ending the season that began when I rolled dice for the first time for this replay in December 2011.

It was a long season; 16 months of rolling games, recording scores and some stats and watching what happened.

It was a good season. When I embarked upon this, I wanted to see what would have happened if the baseball strike didn’t occur. There were some highs: Mike Schmidt hit 53 home runs in my replay. Jerry Reuss threw two no-hitters for the Dodgers. There were some lows: Minnesota lost 26 in a row and ended with a record of 48-114. The Twins, Toronto, New York Mets, Chicago Cubs and Atlanta all lost at least 100 games.

As I’ve said so many times here before, but for the benefit of first time readers, APBA is a statiscally-based replay sports game. Baseball players for the season are given cards with numbers on them. Replayers roll dice, match the roll to numbers on the cards and determine play results.  I’ve been playing APBA basketball since 1977 and baseball since 1998.

The 1981 replay is the eighth season I’ve completed and this was one of the better ones, despite Minnesota’s awful outcome.

When the regular season ended, Detroit and Baltimore were tied for the American League East, each posting 97-65 records. The Tigers beat Baltimore in a one-game playoff, but were defeated by Kansas City, 3 game to 1, in the American League Championship Series.

In the National League, Los Angeles, which won the West Division by 9 games over Houston, swept Montreal in the three-game National League Championship Series.

The Royals took the first game of the World Series, 1-0, over the Dodgers on Amos Otis’ RBI double in the seventh inning. L.A. took the next two games, 9-0 and 6-2. Willie Aikens drove in the go-ahead run in Game 4 for the Royals in the ninth, and Kansas City tied the Series at two games apiece.

And that was it for the Royals. Dusty Baker hit two home runs for the Dodgers in Game 5 for the win and Rick Monday added two homers of his own in Game 6. McRae popped out and the season was over.

So, the 1981 cards are put back in their envelopes, the envelopes back in the box and the box back on the shelf. It’s over. 

I just pulled out the 1942 card set and have written down the teams’ schedules for that year, the pitching rotations and the stat pages I keep. 

Tonight, I’ll start replaying this season, and again, I’ll see what happens. I hope it’s as entertaining as the 1981 season was.